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UVic Is Top 10 (Again) In Physics World

The University of Victoria is “rounding out the math” on another year of discovery by once again being named as a “Top Ten” for breakthroughs in physical sciences. On Dec. 14, one of the world’s leading physics magazines, Physics World, named two projects with strong UVic connections to its top 10 list for 2012.

The Physics World award for breakthrough of the year goes “to the ATLAS and CMS collaborations at CERN for their joint discovery of a Higgs-like particle at the Large Hadron Collider.” Nine other research initiatives are highly commended including the BaBar collaboration.

The UVic-ATLAS team played a part in a major new chapter this summer in the global hunt for the Higgs boson particle, and has played a key role in the massive subterranean LHC experiment near Geneva since bringing Canada into ATLAS in 1992. The UVic group is responsible for several crucial components of the ATLAS detector, as well as poring over the thousands of gigabytes of data.

BaBar is an international high-energy physics project based at the SLAC National Accelerator Lab in California and involves approximately 400 physicists from around the world. Researchers continue to mine data from the subatomic collisions (collected 1999 to 2008) under the leadership of principal investigator and UVic physicist Dr. Michael Roney.

Last year, the LHC as well as UVic’s NEPTUNE Canada ocean network were on the list of humankind’s 10 most ambitious science projects, in the digital edition of Popular Science magazine.

Dr. Robert Kowalewski (Department of Physics and Astronomy) at 250-721-7698 or kowalews@uvic.caDr. Kowalewski is the department chair and has been involved in both projects and is available to media for comment.UVic adjunct professor Dr. Rob McPherson is the ATLAS-Canada spokesperson and can be contacted by cell at 604-723-2294 or on email at either rmcphers@uvic.ca or rmcphers@triumf.ca.
Dr. Roney is the BaBar spokesperson and can be contacted via email at mroney@uvic.ca or on campus at 250-721-7705.

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